Switch breakdown:
These are the switches I personally own at one point or another.
- Tactile White: always has LED slot for top housing, commonly found in Sony Audio Units
- Linear White: commonly found in NCR board
- Linear Amber(heavy): commonly found in the same NCR board on the spacebar
- Linear Stripe Amber(light): commonly found in the same NCR board on the enter key
- Clicky Amber(heavy): commonly found in NTC boards, or sometimes Monterey KB101
- Clicky Cyan(light): commonly found in Focus FK-555 or Datavue Laptop
The Cons
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3-pins over-engineering piece of shit switchplate:
Unless you have a professional desoldering gun, I do not suggest harvesting these switches. The pins are the smallest comparing to SKCL/M and MX. Not only that, a little bit overheating will immediately kill the switches. The fail rate for my harvested omrons are about 8%, which is absurdly high comparing to 2% for SKCL/M and 0.5% for MX. In one video Chyros mentioned that these switches are very finicky, I believe partly because the switchplate are made of very soft plastic, it is easy malleable thus permanently destroy the switchplates. I tried both high heat and low heat and the fail rate is still that high around 8-10% per batch. Coupled with the fact that they have 3 pins for no reason, you WILL fuck up.
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The absolute worst switch type for rework comparing to MX, SKCL/M, Model M, Model F, and Topre (please refer to
the build section for this)
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The limitation of cap choices
B3G-S omrons are fatter, vertically, compare to SKCL/M. The thicker caps will not work properly with these switches. On the left are SKCL/M native caps and on the right are Omron native caps(all row 3)
1. AEK
2. Next Non-ADB (AE doubleshot)
3. Dell AT101 (AE dyesub)
4. IBM 5140 (IBM dyesub)
5. Sony BKE (Sony dyesub possbly)
6. NCR something something (Omron dyesub)
7. Datavue (Omron dyesub)
5,6,7 are fully depressed with no problem for Row-3 caps
2,3,4 are not fully depressed for Row-3 caps because of the extra nubs inside the caps
The pros:
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Consistency The number one thing that Alps will never get correctly
All housings are the same with branding on top housings
All stems of the same type are consistent in colors (I'm looking at you SKCM Blues)
All stems are perfectly symmetrical, no extra slit/cut like SKCM stems
All switchplates are blacks, despite how shitty these were designed, they are consistent
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Same springs as SKCL/M series: yes you can use aftermarket springs for these switches
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Softer plastic
The housing are made of softer plastic, most likely POM. Hence the bottoming sounds are not as harsh as the SKCL/M series. This in turn makes the linear whites an interesting breed.
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Longer travel distance than SKCM and NO BUMPS
This is a major win for linear B3G-S, absolutely no phantom bumps when you bottom out, couple with the softer plastic housing, this is the perfect stepchild between SKCL and MX if you're looking for shorter travel true linears with muted bottoming sounds.
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Tactile Whites makes sense
At first we were aiming for Linear and Clicky Omrons, but throughout the development phase we realize that Tactile Omrons are the true champion if you want to experience Omrons. The tactile leaves are clipped into the housings, so no matter how much abuses you put on Tactile Omrons,
they will never start to click.
